Murray Baumgarten–Teaching Statement 2000-01
Professor, Literature

I am honored by the nomination for this teaching award. It is a delight to think that it comes as the result of student initiative, for to me teaching has always been a collaborative enterprise bringing student, teacher, and text together. To study and to teach literature as I do is to deal with story, character, and narrative, fundamental elements of our everyday experience. Part of my task involves reaching for a heightened awareness and developing a critical understanding of just those elements that constitute narrative, character, and story. In this process, student and teacher learn together. My first encounter with the formal elements of story and narrative probably occurred as a refugee child in Colon, Panama. Attending both the American school and the Jewish kheder, I realized it was not just information that was being transmitted but cultural trajectories highlighted for me by their evident differences. I think I've been involved in comparative literature ever since.

As the campus has changed over the years so too has my teaching. As a founder of Stevenson College, I took an active role in defining its core course, in which I still participate upon occasion. I was the founding chair of the Modern Society & Social Thought Program and one of the earliest members of the Literature Department; I helped work out the required (mostly poetry) sequence in English which I taught most recently last spring. I taught the first courses in American Romanticism on the campus more than 30 years ago. Among my favorite courses was one I offered on the European historical novel; much of the material of that course has made its way into courses I've offered since on diasporic fiction. With the founding of the Dickens Project 20 years agoÑI was its first directorÑI helped to make the study of Dickens a regular feature of the literature curriculum. And as the holder of the Neufeld-Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies with Peter Kenez, I brought the study of the literature and historical context of the Holocaust into the general education offerings of the campus. All of these institutional innovations and curricular building efforts have involved balancing professional definitions of the field of literary study and student interest in a fluid, changing, and ongoing dialogue. I hope to articulate some aspects of that dialogue in this necessarily brief comment on my recent teaching practice.

Reading Then & Now
One thread tying these different courses together involves the problem of distance. The problem I face is how to communicate the differences between the historical worlds of these disparate literaturesÑthe Hebrew Bible or the Iliad, both staples of the Stevenson Core Course; the memoirs of Holocaust survivors; and the world-creating fiction of Dickens, among othersÑand the contemporary experiences of my students, as well as my own, without flattening what is learned into mere information. How to make these texts gateways to cultural worlds that will, in triangulating student, teacher, and text, make fresh exploration possible? What is it about literature that can grip us and turn us from passive consumers into active participants? How, in Carlyle's wonderful phrase, to make reading an experience that "excites us to self-activity?"

Reading Novels & Telling Lies
One tactic I"ve used over the years is to show how texts shift in their meanings depending upon the contexts in which they are placed. Comparisons often lead to questions of cognitive dissonance; how to reconcile different and yet apparently equally legitimate readings raises issues I hope my students cannot evade but will have to respond to. I present the conundrum, and then suggest lines of approach. Dickens, the great entertainer and the master fiction-writer, both deserve acknowledgement; how we treat the two tells us a lot about our willingness to recognize the multiple and over-determined meanings of literary works. The texts I cherish, including the Hebrew Bible, live simultaneously in many cultures. In class I often argue for a given interpretation and then remind my students that everything I have said might be a lie; and literature after all, as Plato and Dante have both asserted at different times, is a beautiful lie. Because they teach us to pretend and make believe, these texts demand interpretation and comparative analysis. Part of the classroom strategy as a teacher is to get my students to read texts carefully, thoughtfully, and passionatelyÑand then to re-read them.

My job is to set out the problem; solutions and resolutions can only be found in the process of reading and interpretation; answers imposed from above don't teach the fullness of reading and interpretation. For me literature is the storehouse of reading and writing; it invites us into the process of unpacking narratives and then re-creating them through exegesis and interpretation. Thereby it offers the possibility of mastering the skills by which culture engages us, an activity which can be outlined and articulated but can only be mastered through practice and the development of the skills of critical thinking and careful reading.

I have thus resisted the temptation to impose my own readings, offering instead essential materials for interpretation. That has led me to bring differing contexts to texts and situate them historically, personally, and culturally. It has led to varying strategies that engage the informal language of student response and connect its immediacy and passion to the studied discourse of literary and cultural analysis. I have found the organization of my increasingly large classes into small talking groups, which report back after preparing specific assignments, very helpful in nurturing the intimate responses to texts that make literature a living experience. It has also meant encouraging collaborative work along the lines of scientific laboratory efforts, including student reports on their explorations and discussions, and even the occasional writing of papers by these groups.

Interpretations come in different forms, be they translations, film versions, or scholarly essays; to read Dickens, for example, only as a nineteenth century novelist is to miss out on the pleasure of his comedy and the relevance of his psychological portraits. He expected us to be aware of the theatrical qualities of his writing that led to their immediate dramatization as plays, even before they were completed as serial fiction. When we read a Dickens novel in serial parts, class by class and week by week, I tell students they may not read ahead. The admonition always elicits laughter but in the course of the quarter becomes a boundary leading to wondrous speculation and analysis of character, motive, situation, plot, and scene. The tactic helps import contemporary habits of soap-opera watching into reading this nineteenth century master's work, and both student experience and the understanding of Dickens's achievement are reciprocally enhanced. This tactic also reminds students, as I do explicitly, that writing engages cultural strategies we regularly take for granted because they are so ubiquitous and thus often make their greatest impact below our awareness. Students deserve to learn about the latent functions of their culture and thus discover how to think critically, for they are, after all, the future writers of their culture, which I hope will be informed by the great thought-provoking traditions of the histories of literary experience which I regularly teach.

Part of teaching Dickens is to contextualize his fictions in terms of the stories of the ancient world; it is no accident that David Copperfield plays Sheherezade to Steerforth. It is also to understand that ancient versions often nest in modern stories, like the history of the languages in which they are written. To read modern literature without some knowledge of ancient texts, including the Bible, is to truncate their meanings. I offer examples of interpretive strategies and elicit implications in the detail of local meanings and as more general paradigms and models; they are not to be memorized as if they were holy writ; rather, they are to be hearkened to as patterns, offering pathways into text and context.

Making Believe, Ideal Types, & Historical Truths
Perhaps most challenging and difficult have been the courses I have taught on the Holocaust, often with my colleague Peter Kenez. These courses engage fundamental meanings of the twentieth century, asking us to sort out how the industrial production of death became the purpose of what was thought to be the most civilized and highly educated country in Europe. The texts dealt with in these courses, including those of Elie Wiesel, Nehama Tec, and Primo Levi, plunge student and teacher into the terrible "gray zone" of ambiguity and horror. These great writers show us how to resist the urge to draw simple lessons and reach for quick solutions. In their writing they refuse to rely on adjectives, adverbs, and expletives for their descriptions. Their expositions of the horrors they experienced, as I point out in various ways to my students, depends on the deployment of nouns and verbs. Theirs is the language of sober historical experience, turned by the magic of literary art into independent worlds for the reader to enter and explore. These texts function as ideal types, reflecting back onto the experience on which they are centered, problematic meanings not readily apparent. In the fundamental questions they ask about the nature of our humanity, they function like a modern Bible and call for the same seriousness of study, thought, and re-reading.

As a UCSC faculty member, teaching is but one of my duties. Yet it is the one that nourishes my service to my profession and nurtures my research. Many of the ideas I have worked out in scholarly articles have originated in class discussion, and much of my research has been tried out in class as hypotheses put to the test. For me the pleasures of the text are the result of conversation, and it is those pleasures which draw us on to reading literature. That is why I hope to continue to teach into the 21st century and continue to learn from my students.